Slashdot Mirror
Nokia Hints At Windows 8 Tablets
MrSeb writes "When the Microsoft-Nokia strategic alliance was first announced in February, there was absolutely no mention of money: Nokia, seemingly on its own accord, had decided that Windows Phone 7 was the future of its smartphone efforts. A week later it emerged that Microsoft and Google had been competing for Nokia's affections — a bidding war that concluded with Microsoft agreeing to pay Nokia billions of dollars to help market and develop Windows phones. Fast forward to today and Nokia's CEO, Stephen Elop, is making rather odd comments about the tablet market: 'There’s a new tablet opportunity coming. We see the opportunity,' Elop said to Bloomberg Businessweek yesterday. Furthermore, he had only positive things to say about Windows 8 — that it's a "supercharged" version of WP7, but for tablets. Does that sound like Nokia is planning to bring out a Windows 8-powered tablet? Is it possible that Microsoft's multi-billion-dollar agreement with Nokia also included Windows 8?"
Yeah, except that they just released an awesome N9 phone (based on Linux too), and WP7 phones are starting to roll out. Later they're thinking of using Linux on their low-end phones. It takes time to change your line-up as much as Nokia did, but they're going to be a serious competitor now. Microsoft actually saved them. They would have gone down the toilet if they had continued with the Symbian stuff and not getting anything new done.
Nokia hasn't been a stranger to tablets before with Maemo and the N770/N800/N810 (and the N900 phone). Throwing that out was not exactly a good idea.
That said, will they find something equally as bad as calling their WP7 phones the Prostitute series?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Maemo is dead because it has no point. It was designed to be a broad stroke at making a base layer (like Apple's Darwin) that had some compatibility, with the idea that vendors would cook up their own UI and branding on the OS.
My buddy has worked on Maemo and Moblin and Meego for the past couple of years, and while he liked it he could never answer my question - "Why choose Maemo when I can just use Debian or Ubuntu or Ret Hat instead? After all *THEY ARE ALREADY HERE!!!!*"
The M trio are all now dead systems because the only people working on them were corporate partners. There was absolutely no open source ecosystem to support the efforts commercially, and Android is good enough for most companies because it's here and it works already.
Initially the M trio was to work only on Intel, as Intel was the actual initiator of the effort. Once that exclusivity was gone, they got quite a bit cooler on the M OS's and pretty much every major partner dropped out one after another.
Not vapor, Nokia will produce Windows 7 phones and I believe they will also do Windows 8 tablets. Let's face it, if your company were sinking, you'd clutch at anything, even if it didn't float.
M$ seems to genuinely believe that they will have some significant presence in the smartphone and tablet markets. Having a strong tie (or ownership depending on what rumors you believe) of a hardware company that makes those gadgets is a reasonable step for them to take. I can even imagine that M$ was having trouble shopping Windows Phone 7 to many of the other manufacturers, so basically has to buy the business to achieve market penetration.
Will any of this work? I don't think so. I don't believe M$ will ever achieve a significant portion of either markets. The advantage is, they still has their core business to keep them going when it's time to throw Nokia overboard.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Nokia was purchased in all but name. They took some cash from MS in exchange for every technology they have.
Wake up.
...a...phone, with true (2005 era) desktop power...with high quality GPS and camera and...several days of battery life...
...is not available with current technology.
Either a much larger battery is needed, which impacts the portable form factor, or much lower capability is included, which counters your requirements. Battery tech is getting better, but not explosively like portable device capability has increased.
It's already dead. The division responsible for N9 has been for all bits and purposes disbanded.
70%? Down, fanboy, down!
When will you Android boosters realize that you are not Google's customers? Nor are the phone companies, for that matter. You are the product that Google is selling to its actual customers, the advertisers.
They saved Apple...
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg